Ars Technica has this article on the HP Slate with specs and pricing, but no release date. It contains a slide purportedly circulating internally at HP comparing it to the iPad. Granted, there are still plenty of details to discover, and much could change before this becomes a shipping product, but my first read-over suggests to me that it will fail for exactly the same reason earlier Tablet-PC efforts failed: performance and battery life.

Battery life comes in at a paltry 5 hours compared to the iPads 10. Livable, but still not a day’s work which is the benchmark for me.

The real killer is the combination of a 1.66 Ghz Intel Atom Z530 and Windows 7 Home Premium. I have never been a fan of the Atom, and my experience with several different netbooks running XP or Windows 7 has not changed my opinion. While people insist you can run Windows 7 in 1 GB of RAM they are only technically right; you can also run XP in 512 MB of RAM but it will be a miserable experience.

Where Apple wins is being able to control the design of the hardware and software. This has always been the problem with Microsoft’s business model where constrained hardware devices are concerned. With desktop computers and servers you usually have enough performance overhead that programmers are no longer dropping down into machine code to squeeze every little speed gain they can because we’ve hit ‘good enough’.

I’m not against Windows 7. I do development work on it every day and believe that it is a good operating system – for full powered hardware. Anybody running it on an Atom chip with 1 GB of RAM is going to feel some pain. But my 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM runs it just fine.

One thing they did get right: weight. At 1.49 lbs they nailed it compared to the iPad. In this case, however, two out of three is bad.

I am not going to argue against the idea that movie studios are evil, greedy money grubbing bastards. That’s the nature of a high-risk/high-reward industry. There are times, however, when we need to calm down and not get worked up about things that are trivial in a broader context.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy comes to Blu-Ray on April 6. Yes, these are the original theatrical cuts of the films, not the extended versions that came out on DVD previously. The only possible explanation, of course, is that Warner’s is going to double dip again – after getting people to buy two copies of the movies on DVD they’ll get them to buy two copies again on Blu-Ray.

Except that people who have a brain won’t do it. When the Rings movies came to DVD for the first time Warners was rather transparent that an extended cut of the film was coming down the road. Now that the Blu-Ray versions of the films are coming out it is also well known that the extended versions are being held back as part of a bigger box set we’ll see once the Hobbit movies are completed.

Is this just greedy witholding? No, I don’t think so.

As a cost saving measure, when the extended cuts of the films were completed in post production the effects rendering was done in 480p, most likely because they were not going to be transfered back to film for theatrical exhibition and to keep costs down. If we simply got an upconverted 480p-> 1080p image on Blu-Ray we’d hear no end of screaming about how we got ripped off. So instead the films will have to go through a post production cycle again to produce a true 1080p image, and that takes time.

Something tells me that Jackson’s production team is a busy with a little something called “The Hobbit”.

Nobody has a gun to their heads forcing them to buy this release when we damn well know another release is coming in a few years. In the meantime the existing DVDs look rather awesome on my big-screen tv even at 480p.

But I don’t see an excuse for flooding Amazon with user reviews that drag the rating down to 1.5 out of 5 just because the product is not the version people wanted. Truthfully there shouldn’t be any user reviews for this since it hasn’t been released yet, but that’s a whole different column.

A word of warning: that Avatar release on April 22 is going to be just the film with no extras (just the way I like it!). This means that someday we’ll get another release of the super extended director’s wet-dream cut, the one that runs 20 hours and begins with the Big Bang.

So while other people are bitchin’ and moanin’, I’ll be relaxing with my Blu-Ray copies of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 and deciding if I want to buy Criterion’s Sanjuro/Yojimbo set. I’d rather have a heart attack because of the butter on my popcorn than the nerd rage over a video release.

Over a week and no Geek Bytes. For that I must apologize and offer a bit of an explanation for the past week.

I run a software development shop for a marketing company. We got dropped a very short deadline that has tied up almost all of my attention for the past few weeks. Then I got sick. Then I got better. Then I got tired from not sleeping properly.

Now to top it off my desktop computer has decided to emulate a caffeinated hyperactive two-year-old in a permanent tantrum. The MacBook Pro I use to research and record the podcasts got conscripted into serving as a development environment for testing web services.

So I’m sitting here on Sunday with a borrowed computer that doesn’t have my web links, rss feeds, or audio tools. And, of course, time. It takes a surprisingly long time to research, write up, record, edit and post 10 minutes of audio, even if most of it is just me droning on. Geek Bytes is both a hobby and test for me, to see if I could keep up with a twice a week short cast to summarize news and new releases now that The Geek Life weekly is devoted to fewer stories in more depth. Clearly, I failed the test.

Today I’m working on recovering my data from my backup discs, in preparation for a replacement for the desktop computer that should arrive sometime this coming week. I also have a deadline at the end of the week that may take up most of my time.

I don’t want to give up Geek Bytes or The Geek Life, but I don’t want to do a half-a**ed job of it either. Would the material of Geek Bytes work better in blog postings? I don’t know, but I’m willing to try it.

What I’d really like to hear is what you think. Please write to us at talkback@thegeeklife.tv or comment here. What could we do to make this more interesting or useful to you?

In the mean time, thanks for listening, and we’ll record again on Tuesday.

Seriously…the round keys on the keyboard evoke the feel of the old manual typewriters. I’m sure the specs will suck, which is too bad…because I really want this!

Via Engadget.

We are living in a ‘transition’ between old packaged media and new media downloads. As with any such time weird juxtapositions are bound to happen, such as this one.

Elektra has re-released the catalog for “The Cars”, with shiny new remasters, on CD. Nothing fancy or new in the packaging. The CDs are going for $6.99 at Best Buy and Amazon (and Amazon shows the MSRP as $7.99).

iTunes has these albums too. They can be yours for $9.99 each. So much for that “variable pricing” the labels insisted they had to have.

Honestly though, CDs should have come down to this price point years ago. When they first started shipping in the 80s the criticism that they were expensive (and compared to vinyl they really were!) was countered by the argument that as volume increased costs would go down. Somehow they never did until mass discounters like Best Buy and WalMart were willing to sell them at cost or as loss leaders to get foot traffic into their stores.

I feel such a luddite for still buying CDs, but I get a nice plastic backup copy of my tunes and sometimes a nifty little booklet with lyrics. In this case, it was cheaper than the download. Imagine that.

Now where’s my LP of Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven”?

On the software side, the three announcements were iLife ’09 (with iPhoto and GarageBand getting the limelight), iWork, and iWork.com for document sharing. With one exception, all three announcements were pretty much “meh” for me.

iLife is starting to suffer from featuritis. Sure, the face and geo-tagging features of iPhoto are kind of nice, but as time goes on the application grows more complex. I won’t know for sure until I get my hands on a copy, but moving from the original albums to ‘events’ stacks took some adjusting.

The big feature I like in GarageBand is “Artist Lessons”. My big complaint about games like Guitar Hero is that they actually teach you nothing about playing a real guitar. (I’ve read that the musicians who do best at these games are drummers, for obvious reasons). I think its really neat - and shows some real educational potential – that for $4.99 you can download an add-on for GarageBand and Sting will teach you how to play one of this songs. If this gains any popularity I can see it being used as a promotional vehicle (given away free when you buy the whole album, for example).

As for iWork, while I think it is pretty and works fine for light work, it is no replacement for Office. (Heck, even Office 2008 for Mac isn’t a replacement for Office on Windows, but that is a different conversation.) I’ve said before that Apple needs to take Bento and bundle it in to iWork so you get a database app too.

My biggest disappointment has to be the 17″ MacBook Pro. Having a sealed, non-user replaceable battery in the MacBook Air I understand: for most people the Air is not their primary computer but a travel companion, so being out of use for a few days while Apple does the battery replacement is not too heinous. But the kind of people buying a 17″ workhorse may need the extended battery life, and won’t want to go without their computer for something as stupid as a battery replacement. Every manufacturer’s projections on battery life and the number of charging cycles the battery can take are badly over stated.

But take a look at what $2,799 buys you: 2.66 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, a 320 gb hard drive (running at 5400 rpm!), and a gorgeous 1920×1200 LED display with an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT. I can get those specs out of a Windows PC for less than $2000. Great that you can finally break the 4GB barrier in a notebook, but upgrading to 8 GB RAM will set you back another $1,000 as a build-to-order option.  Don’t forget to throw in for a mini-display port to DVI or VGA adapter if you do presentations.

This is clearly a high-margin notebook for working professionals and consumers with lots of spare cash.

The best news has to be the iTunes music store going DRM-FREE 256 kbps AAC for all tracks. Songs purchased will now play nicely with other music players supporting AAC (such as the Zune), and for most people the 256 kbps tracks are as close to CD as their listening environment will permit. Now there are just two more improvements needed: allow customers to re-download their purchases if a download goes bad or they suffer a data loss, and remove DRM from the video store purchases while getting hard on content providers about the quality of their MPEG-4 files. If I have to pay $15 for a movie or $35-$40 for a TV season, I would at least like to see the purchase match DVD quality, and MPEG-4 can do it.

Last Wednesday I gave Apple a basket of thorns over problems with the iPhone. The good news is that all those problems can be fixed. The bad news is that, in some cases, they either won’t want to or will have disincentives to doing so.

In the interest of fairness, I thought it would be a good idea to discuss what Apple got right, and what things about the iPhone are satisfying and make it worth the price.

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Generally speaking, I like Apple’s stuff. I have one of the 24″ iMacs at home, running OS X and Vista Home Premium (via BootCamp). It runs both quite nicely. I have an Apple TV hooked up to it, and while I have a few reservations am generally pleased with it.

And then there’s my iPhone, a first-generation 8-gig model I got last November. There’s a lot to like about it. It’s solid, has survived a few drops without damage beyond a nick on the paint, syncs with Exchange nicely, and because I take it everywhere I always have a notepad and a camera on hand.

That said, I have a few issues with it. I won’t get into the recessed headphone jack (fixed with the 3G model) or the interference that blares through every speaker in the house when it is turned on. No, my issues range from the practical to the philosophical, and I’ve outlined them in brief below.

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